Grandmothers' Story

This week, a dear friend of mine lost her grandmother.

I lost my grandmother ten years ago.

My husband lost his grandmother ten years before that.

Grandmother Number One was named Marguerite.
Grandmother Number Two was named Anna.
Grandmother Number Three was named Cecilia.

One grandmother lived to be one-hundred-and-two.  She spent that last year of her life curled in a fetal position, blind.

Another grandmother lived to be eighty-six.  She spent the last year of her life not knowing where she was, a feeding tube slurping sea-sand into her stomach.

Another grandmother died shouting at the nursing home attendants. The place where her right leg should have been was the place where they set their black bottoms, instead.

"When you die you got to die!" she said flatly.

The grandmother who was blind grew up in a bordello.

The grandmother who lost her leg chased "the colored" off her property with a hoe.

The grandmother who didn't know where she was traveled halfway around the world to be with the woman she loved.

Two of them died without a wrinkle on their faces. (Beauty is that nurse who comes when you don't need her anymore.)

One of them was married to a wildcatter.

One of them (the racist) was hired to replace a first, dead wife with the same name.  (The children hated her.)

One--the one who traveled halfway around the world to be with the woman she loved--died on the morning of that lover's funeral.

They fill the ground, like stars.

--MD

Adult Swim

In Austin a few months ago, after one of my lectures on writing and creativity, a woman in her forties came up to me and asked if she could talk to me about her dream of writing a book about her experiences as an immigrant in America.  After chatting for a while, we decided to go and have a cup of coffee--my new friend was bright and articulate, the day was beautiful, and the setting (on wide, green Lake Austin) was energetic, with boaters and paddlers splashing all around us.  The chance to sit in the sun and talk about memoir was irresistible, so we settled down at a table, and she shared her story, both unique and familiar to me (as an immigrant writer) about feeling neither here nor there, neither one thing nor the other, unsure of home but somehow, slowly, more sure of the self that crossed fluidly back and forth between two cultures.  She told me her book would begin on an airplane . . .

She asked me to tell her everything I knew about undertaking such a project (she was a tax specialist, and this was the word she used) and what it felt like; I remember telling her that the journey was long, required a great deal of passion and doggedness, and would take her through not just intellectual but emotional highs and lows.  We talked about what she read, and what she liked to read.  She'd never written anything creative before, she told me, or taken a creative writing class, but she had always believed, with hard work, she could do anything.  She was so self-possessed I didn't doubt her for a moment.  We parted with smiles and hugs, and agreed to stay in touch.

Last week we spoke again, over the phone, and I was curious to hear how she was feeling about her project.  She told me flatly she'd given up on the whole idea.  After talking to me, she said, she'd admitted to herself that what she'd been carrying around in her head all these years was the fantasy of publishing a book--not the job of actually writing one.  After our talk, she said, quite confidently, she'd understood she didn't have the patience to do it, the will, and it was time to let the fantasy go.  She said it felt wonderful.  Like a boulder lifted from her shoulders.

***

A few weeks later I sat with another woman in her forties, an old, dear friend from high school whom I hadn't seen in ten years.  We had dinner, and at first things were a little stilted, as things tend to be when a lot of water has gone under the legs of the bridge.  Then finally we started talking not just about our successes, but about our many failures and detours and dead-ends.  She told me she had never felt like a very creative person, though once she'd thought she would do something artistic that would make her wildly famous, like be a singer.  She remembered, even now, very clearly the moment in her twenties when she realized it wasn't going to happen.  She'd made peace with it a long time ago.  It was fine.

But then, very recently and out of the blue, she'd decided that she needed to be creative somehow, because she (a lawyer) was somehow less than she should be.  So she bought every book she could find on throwing ceramic pots, and paid three thousand dollars to have a kiln installed in her garage.  After a few months, and after much contemplation of the kiln, she sold it.  Without ever having fired it up or touched a single piece of clay.  She'd realized that it was a fantasy; that she really wasn't interested in doing what it took to make pots.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I'm fine.  Do you know what I really like?  Finding pots.  Finding things.  I love those treasure-hunting shows on TV.  That's when I realized I don't want to be stuck in one place, in my garage.  I want to travel.  I want to find unexpected things."

***

One day I woke up and decided I needed to take swimming lessons.  My mind had been seized, almost overnight, by the idea that I must swim the English Channel.  It was a persistent dream.  That I would become athletic.  Buy a one-piece, regulation, approved bathing suit.  Register with the Channel Swimming Association.  Train for months on end.  Arrive in England.  Hire a pilot boat.  Battle the Channel garbage, the tankers, the current to get to France (which tries to pull you away, I knew, just as you begin to reach it).  Return triumphantly and, as is the right of every, and only, successful Channel swimmers, sign my name on that ancient pub wall.

I read every book I could find about the crossing.  I bought goggles.  I discovered I had no natural talent for the crawl, that I was sorely lacking in bodyfat and buoyancy, and also that I didn't like and was in fact afraid of depths I couldn't reach with my big toe.  I discovered, in fact, that I don't like to swim for more than thirty minutes at a time, and prefer keeping my head out of the water, even then.  I started to let the dream go.

It didn't feel like a relief, though.   More like a death.  The death of a universe, alternate though it might have been.  The collapsing of a star.

***

There is an art, of course, to relinquishment.  It's often an act of will, not just a giving up.  A creative leap.  This is not my place.  Jump.  Here I go. 

I'm not quite sure I've mastered it.

I looked today, again, at open swims, places to train in lakes and bays and oceans.  I haven't been in the water since last summer.  I don't like cold, you see.  I won't swim in the winter.  (The Channel is forty degrees.)

When my new friend in Austin had told me it was my describing to her what it took to write a book that had driven the idea completely out of her head, I'd said something like, "Oh my God!" and made a sound that approached blanching over my mobile.

"No, no, don't feel bad," she'd consoled me.  "It made me see more clearly what I really want to do.  And what I really want to do is just start working less.  And have more time for myself.  That is really the dream.  The dream of time."

I want more time.

I want to be able to travel.  To find things.

I want to sign my name on that ancient pub wall.

In the dream, there are clues.  But then we always knew that.

I want to sign my name.


--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

Oil and Water . . . a Fundraiser for the Gulf Coast

Friends, I'm so pleased to have one of the essays from this blog, "Butterfly," included in this anthology.  If you're looking for a gift with a bit of heart this season, or simply want to support recovery from the BP spill, or simply like good collections of creative nonfiction/essays, I hope you'll check this out.  From LL Publications:

Members of the Southern Writers group She Writes, Zetta Brown and Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson Brown, gathered submissions and created an anthology of stories, poems, and recollections in response to the BP Oil disaster in the Gulf. Oil and Water...and Other Things That Don’t Mix features 27 authors, women and men all dealing with the theme: “Conflict...Resolution Optional.”

All proceeds from Oil and Water...and Other Things That Don’t Mix will go to directly benefit MOBILE BAYKEEPER, and BAY AREA FOOD BANK, two charities helping to combat the effects of the spill and help the communities affected.

Authors included in the collection are Jenne’ R. Andrews, Shonell Bacon, Lissa Brown, Mollie Cox Bryan, Maureen E. Doallas, Mylène Dressler, Nicole Easterwood, Angela Elson, Melanie Eversley, Kimeko Farrar, L B Gschwandtner, John Klawitter, Mary Larkin, Linda Lou, Kelly Martineau, Patricia Anne McGoldrick, Ginger McKnight-Chavers, Carl Palmer, Karen Pickell, Dania Rajendra, Cherie Reich, Jarvis Slacks, Tynia Thomassie, Amy Wise, Dallas Woodburn, and contributing editors Zetta Brown and Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson Brown.

Retailers who wish to stock the Oil and Water anthology can contact the publisher directly: editor(at)ll-publications.com

Celebration! ASN Recognized in Creative NonFiction Issue 39

Dear friends, I'm taking a moment this morning to thank Creative NonFiction, one of our finest journals celebrating the form, for publishing "Meeting House," (re-posted below) in its Fall 2011 issue.  Over the summer, CNF announced its quest to find examples of "truly literary blogging," and "Meeting House"/American Stories NOW was one of two blogs selected to be featured, chosen from over 800 considered by the editors.  I'm pleased and honored, and delighted to post the piece again, for those of you who may have missed it the first time.  Here's to the canvas we call flash non-fiction, and the quest to render the world a few words at a time.  And don't forget to order your copy of CNF.  Let's support the genre we love.

Meeting House

The Live Oak Meeting House, where Friends gather each Sunday to sit in silence until the spirit moves them, wasn't entirely quiet, at first. The child in the pew in front of me whispered as she nuzzled against her grandmother's neck. The couple opposite me turned the pages of the books they had brought with them to read. A man behind me sniffled with a cold; in the windowseat to my left, two more children whispered and squirmed. A woman in front of the couple with the books wiped a tear from her eye, then began writing in a journal. Around and somehow over us was a sound--I was a visitor to the meeting, and thought at first it must be the cooling system, then decided it was recorded audio--inhaling and exhaling. Like amplified, human breathing.

At last all was silent but for this sound. Even the children held their peace. The woman with the journal continued to write. A middle-aged man behind her, with his eyes closed and his hands folded in his lap, hadn't moved a muscle in the fifteen minutes since the meeting had begun. I turned my head a little to the right, and saw, tucked in the corner, a young, pale woman in a wheelchair, a white hose attaching her to a breathing machine. This was the sound filling the Live Oak Meeting House.

After a few more minutes, a middle-aged man stood and said:

"I'm sitting here thinking of a man who once told me he wished he was young again. He said to me: 'God I wish I was seventy again.' It was forty years ago when he said this to me. Across a chessboard. We were playing in a tournament together, and I was a teenager, and I wanted to win so badly. And this man, who was in his eighties, could see it. So he looked up at me and he said, 'God I wish I could be young again. Young people tend to think only about beginnings. What you need to do is think about your end game. Even when you're young. Think. Think that way.' He ended up teaching me so much about chess, that afternoon. And then I never saw him again. Or thought about him much. Until last week. I remembered him, for one reason and another, and realized that after all these years I might be able to look him up on the Internet. And I couldn't believe what I found. He'd had a biography written about him. He'd helped to train Bobby Fischer. He'd been somebody.

"The more I read, the more I was astonished. He'd spent his whole life in and out of penitentiaries. He'd done time at Alcatraz. One of his specialties was stealing cars. Especially Volkswagens. He loved to steal Volkswagens. He'd steal them and turn back the odometers. And there was more. In the 1930's he'd been arrested while holding the bag of money in the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping case. He hadn't kidnapped the baby; he'd only claimed to, in a fraud, and then demanded ransom money, and when they came and gave it to him he got caught. Off to jail he went. His whole life was like that. Stealing cars. In and out of jail. What finally stopped him was a car accident. In a Volkswagen. When he was seventy years old. After that he just played chess. His whole life he was a con-man . . . I guess I'm just thinking, you never know who's sitting across from you."

The man sat down.

The woman's regular, controlled breathing filled the room again. I liked the sound of it. I liked the way it divided up the minutes, made me feel my own breath, and aware of the breathing around me, made me glad the woman was breathing, and getting help to breathe, and glad we were all breathing, and that we still had time.

At a signal, the children rose and were guided out to daycare, where their assignment for the day was to make a heart like a mirror, a heart covered in tinfoil, so that when you held it up, you would see your own face.


--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone

What Am I Doing Here?

I meet Dale at the trailhead to Flat Pass.  The rains have churned the trail to pieces.  Our dogs run ahead of us, open-mouthed, instant friends.  They plunge down the hill toward the creek.  Dale walks with a dryer sheet tucked like a television make-up tissue into her collar, to keep the flies off.  Dale knows unexpected things.  For years she worked for the FBI, one of the first group of 35 women to be hired and trained as agents by the Bureau.  In those days her neck was draped with gold and diamonds: she worked Corruption, and one of her longest undercover assignments was posing as a rich woman eager to make more money by breaking the law.  She fingered wiseguys, businessmen, politicians on the take.  In those days, they didn't expect a pretty woman to be packing both a tape recorder and heat.

"Did you like the work?" I ask, impressed.

"I loved it.  And I was good at it."

Even though we're in the backcountry her blonde hair is perfectly combed, her powder in place, and I can see it would have been easy not to recognize her for Johnny Law.

"Was it tough work?"

"Well, it's just like they say.  You go in thinking you're going to save the world.  Then you despair.  Some of the men I spent months investigating got off, one way or another.  You ask yourself why you're doing it.  Then you become resigned.  Then you decide just to do what you can right where you are.  You try to do good where you can."

Since retiring from the Bureau, Dale grows grass and raises sheep and has the wool shorn and sent to the Navajo reservation to be worked into rugs.  She loves her animals.  You can have a special bond with sheep, she tells me.  They know you, and you know them.  "They're my friends, my companions.  They're wonderful," she adjusts the little white Bounce sheet at her neck.

Her days are almost busier now, she tells me, than when she was an agent.  From morning till night she's working on her property, and the lack of good help doesn't make anything easier.

"You can't get anyone to do any labor.  It's so strange."

We talk for a while about the strange shape our country is in.  The dogs  find the creek again and stand in the middle of it, with the water rushing all around their legs, trying to knock them down.  We talk about how much we love our dogs; we talk about our families.  Dale never married; in the old days she was always working odd hours, with never any time to meet anyone; then later on she found that men weren't too keen on a woman who knew more about firearms than they did.  She could see the insecurity in their eyes before they walked away.

Her father had died some years before, but her mother was still alive, or rather dying under the care of hospice in Colorado.  Not one thing alone was killing her but many things all at once.  Once a month Dale left her sheep to go across the state line.

"My sister and I take turns.  I go, and most of the time my mother doesn't even recognize me.  She just keeps asking me, 'Where am I?  What am I doing here?  What am I doing here?  Please, what am I doing here?'"

Dale calls the dogs out of the water and gives them each a treat.  They come to her hand and then race off again through the scrub.  We turn around and start heading back toward the trailhead.  Dale has to get back to her sheep.  She also had a llama once, but the relationship didn't work out.

"Llamas don't like women," she tells me.


--MD

On Noticing Small Things

On noticing small things: If you haven't done this lately, do it.  The world is an astonishment, a golden coin always jingling in your pocket: whenever you want you can take it out and marvel at its richness.

And you are a part of it.  You are of the same value. There is the elaborate beadwork of your own skin.  There is the perfect array of your eyelashes (bat your eyes, feel them).  There are the textures of the things your eyes fall on, some of them as fine as your own skin, even finer, and some as broad as the hull of a ship. There are tiny things that move and crawl in our gutters, and the way water washes in a gutter, sometimes in long straws, and there is the rather brilliant design of the piece of furniture you might be sitting on, to say nothing of grass and sand, that never complain when we sit there, what resilience, what beauty, what fineness. When was the last time you looked at a cloud, a shadow, the fold in your elbow, the perfect roundness of a dinner plate, a clever, clever cardboard box, the shapes of words themselves?  Them selves. Oh it's delicious, it's funny, it's charming!  And there is the way rust grows and even garbage lies, waiting to become something else.  And sounds.  Not just one, most of them come in layers.  And your ear can hear.  Have you listened?  Have you tried to separate the sounds?  Take your hand and feel whatever is near you.  Lick your lips and notice the taste.  Close your eyes and watch color turn down, as though it had volume, as though it were also a sound.

Open your eyes.  Smell the air.  What is it?

Extraordinary.  Take time.  Count the riches.  Brush the earth off as happily as you would the roughest diamond.

--MD


Photo credit: Bruce Barone

The Cut

She cuts my hair.

Her own is a starburst of magenta and yellow, fireworks on display.  It must be fun, every morning, I think, to stand your hair up on end.  It must make you feel constantly surprised.

We talk.  She cuts my hair whenever I'm in town, and though months pass before we see each other again, we always pick up as though she's just lathered my scalp under water the day before.  We talk about our work and travels, we gossip about celebrities, we mourn or praise the state of the union, we admit we're not exercising as much as we used to, we share a little about our families.

"How is he?" I ask about her husband while she drapes the bib around me (it always makes me feel like a little girl again).

Her husband (like my father) was diagnosed at 51 with congestive heart failure.  He's already lived longer than expected--thanks, she's told me, to his athletic background and his mighty lungs.  He was an avid mountain biker and the owner of a successful mountain bike shop in Colorado; but at 51 he'd been told by doctors that if he wanted to prolong his life, he needed to spend the rest of it tethered to an oxygen tank.  At first he refused.

"But . . . but how did you feel about that?" I ask her, wondering, thinking:  how do you manage, how do you go on when someone you love pushes away the line that could keep you as one?

"Well," she combs my hair and then has me part it myself, "it really troubled me at first.  But then I made my peace with it.  It's his life, after all.  We respect each other that way, these days."

I try to say something reassuring, consoling: "Well, at least you can look back and say it's been a good marriage."

"Oh yes," she nods her mane and takes her scissors out of her pocket and narrows her bright, eyelined eyes.  "But we're not married anymore."

I stare in the mirror.  I follow her round, nimble, aproned body moving around my small, bibbed one.  For the last three years, we've been talking like old friends, while my cut hair fell over her toes in her flip-flops--and I didn't know this?

"You're not married?"

"No.  I still say he's my husband.  But we divorced years ago.  So many things weren't working.  He was very . . . competitive."

Then she tells me that, years before, when they were first married, he had wanted her to mountain bike with him.  And so she had.  She had learned how.  And she had frantically tried to keep up with him while he asked her to do more and more and more impossible things, impossible climbs, straining, gasping to push her body beyond what it wanted to do, beyond what she wanted it to do, beyond what she wanted at all.

"I would be on a mountain with him--I mean dying for air, just dying--and he wouldn't even wait for me.  He was like that.  He loved doing better than other people.  He loved beating men younger than he was.  Everyone.  Everything was like that.  He wanted the upper hand. I wanted to live in a city.  He wanted to live in the country.  He wanted me to work in his business.  I wanted my own shop.  So, finally, we divorced, and then he got diagnosed, and I came back to take care of him.   And now he can hardly do anything.  Do you know what happened one day?"

"What?" I hold very still as she razors the back of my neck.

"One day he found out he couldn't get up a hill anymore.  How nearly impossible it was for him to take a breath.  And then he came home and he apologized to me.  He said he'd never known how hard it could be to climb."

"But you've stayed divorced."

She starts trimming my bangs.  Expertly.  Fast.  "Believe me, we're much better off as friends.  We each have our own space in the house.  And now I can even admit I learned so much from him.  I mean, I was one amazing mountain biker.  But me, I know when enough is enough."

Then she says that the doctors didn't really understand the nature of his heart disease--that that they had told him there was nothing to indicate why his heart was failing, and that they could only speculate that he had used his heart in the wrong way when he was younger, pushing it in the wrong way.

"He's doing the oxygen now?"

"Oh yes.  24/7.  Wait, this is going to be cute," she says and gets the hand mirror and spins me around in the chair, so that I can see what she could see, what she has seen, all along.

--MD

Small-Town Fourth

We got to the park just after the parade of water and fire trucks and decorated bicycles had gone around its small green square.  Uncle Sam, his top-hat made of something soft, like the coat of a stuffed animal, waded in his long striped pants through the grass.  The water trucks had snugged up close to the curb, under the cottonwoods, and their giant hoses were now feeding the white slip 'n' slide the children were screaming and hurtling their bodies over.  The park's pool has been closed all summer for renovation.  Vote for Sheriff White the side of the biggest, shiniest water truck says.

The signs around the park clearly say No Dogs Allowed, On Leash Or Off, but our dogs stay politely near the curb, and that woman's mini-Yorkie pup doesn't really count yet as a dog, small as a haircomb, and anyway petting-camels are being unloaded from a horse trailer, the first one already tied by its red leash to a tree.  You can forget how huge a camel is, how hairy its hump.  The children who've never seen one before stare.  Those of us who have, stare.  Cotton candy freezes in beards under everyone's chins.

Jamie from Animal Control comes by in her black uniform--she doesn't mind if you call her the dog-catcher, by the way--and bends down to pet our dogs.  She tells us she lost her beloved Yodi, part-coyote, part dog, three days ago.  She says she can't talk about it, and goes on stroking our youngest, her eyes wet.

The mayor walks by and doesn't smile.  Maybe he's tired.  Maybe politicians need a holiday, too.  Under the gazebo a high-school girl is reading her winning essay answering the question, "Does America Still Have Heroes?"  We can't hear a single word she's saying, what with the children dive-bombing into the water just to her right.  I worry about how long she practiced, if she imagined silence and dignity attending her words.  I stand still to let her know I see her.  A young Navajo boy is practicing his lasso-work while his mother sells fry bread.  He expertly ropes a mock-metal-calf he's brought with him, the knot around its neck as perfect as a pretzel.

Everyone wants to eat something, ice cream, palm-shaped sugar cookies, popcorn, cotton candy, coffee cake.  It's ninety degrees.  Our friend Tad is selling oven-fired pizzas, delicious, but business has been slow, and he may have to move with his wife and baby to another, cooler town.  Behind him there is one ride, something like a red starfish whirling wildly.  It looks dangerous.

The average age in the park is eight.  The old people look young today in their shorts.  Only their bare knees show the long haul, like a camel's.  A solitary man is trying to sell his apricots from a picnic table.

Our neighbor walks by; he and his wife built their dream house in this town a few years back, a beautiful bed-and-breakfast; and then, soon after it opened, she died.

He has his new girlfriend with him now.

It's a new year, America.

Just beyond the apricots, behind the sign giving the park's name, every kind of bicycle you can imagine lies in the grass, unwatched.

--MD

You can listen to me read this story here.

Legs

If you see someone sitting in a park on a blanket, surrounded by all his belongings, you know the story isn't going to be a happy one.  And yet that doesn't diminish its light.

Ron is sitting on a blanket, his thin legs covered by another one, near the shore of Ellis Lake in downtown Marysville, California.  His two dogs, Poodle and Hank, are close by, chunky chow-and-boxer mixes ("They're also part wild, part timberwolf," he tells me).  Ron's face is thin and stubbled with white beard; tattoos blacken his arms below his t-shirt; on his left shoulder sits a blue-and-white pigeon, tied at the ankle with a shoestring looped through Ron's belt.  The pigeon, Ron explains, isn't tied because the bird might fly away (it can't, with one wing paralyzed and a mended broken leg).  It's tied because, the day before, while Ron was busy repairing his leaky canoe with some silicone, he'd turned around to see a fat white cat with the blue-and-white pigeon in its mouth.  He had just spent weeks repairing the bird's broken leg with a series of popsicle sticks.  He wasn't about to let some cat have it.  So now he kept it leashed.

"I'm not like some people.  I don't see why you should have a pet if you're just going to ignore it."

Ron's canoe is perched at the edge of the lake, with a fishing rod and two life jackets stored inside it.  He makes money by renting the canoe to visitors to Marysville's little oasis, which lies in the center of this Gold Rush town, surrounded by traffic and low, historic buildings.  Ron has no home, although he does have a storage unit, he tells me when I sit down next to him, where he keeps a few things.  "I could go live in my ex-wife's garage, but she's a drug addict.  And she's raising my five kids to sell drugs.  I can't bear to see it.  But when I call social services to check on them, she finds out it was me, and then I'm not allowed to see my kids.  Things aren't so good right now."  He straightens the blanket over his legs.  Ron has bone cancer ("my marrow is drying up"), and after a moment he pulls the blanket back to show me his bare, reedy ankles, and how one of his legs is longer than the other.  MediCal had paid for two rounds of chemo and one of radiation.  But now he was back on the street.  He'd been living by the lake for months, with his canoe and its trailer and his bags of dog food and bird seed, getting by.

He seems to be a familiar sight to the locals; people pass him and smile and wave, then walk on.  Ron calls out, friendly, smiling back.  The bird rides his shoulder.

We talk for a while.  "Have you always lived in Marysville?" I ask while stroking the big, friendly dog beside me, Hank.

"No.  I'm a native Californian, but I've lived all sorts of places.  I used to live in Houston working for Brown & Root.  Once I lived up in Utah in the ski areas, and fixed snowmobiles.  Have you ever been to Salt Lake City?"

"Yes."

"That Mormon Temple there, that white building.  It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life."

All at once I felt something burning down my side.  Hank had hiked his leg and was peeing on me.  And my god, this was no ordinary dog piss.  It was fierce, it smelled wild, of the woods, wolves, packs.  And as strong as skunk.  I leapt up.

What rattled me more than being marked by Hank was the look on Ron's face.  White with shock and shame, every line along his thin mouth was saying:  Someone finally sits down to listen to me, and this is what I let happen . . .

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he kept saying, abject. "I don't know why he did that, I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry."

"It's all right, really, it's no big deal.  I have dogs."  I pointed over to my motorhome, parked on the other side of the street.  "He probably smelled them.  It's all right, really, really, I have a change of clothes right over there."

"I'm so, so sorry.  Hank . . .  Hank . . ."

"It's really nothing."

But the shoulder that had been hoisting the pigeon is sagging.  Ron is ducking his head, pulling Hank to him, and doesn't seem to want to talk anymore.  The moment, hardly begun, has broken.  Confidence is gone.  I'm stinking of Hank, and know I have to go, and clean up.  At the edge of the tame lake the canoe tugs.

I look back.  The last I see of Ron he's sitting, a thin letter 'L' on his blanket, his two dogs standing guard beside him.

--MD

Photo credit: Bruce Barone